Inca agriculture
Inca agriculture was the culmination of thousands of years of farming and herding in the high-elevation Andes mountains of South America, the coastal deserts, and the rainforests of the Amazon basin.
Eastward from the Andes are the rugged foothills above the Amazon Basin, an area of abundant rainfall, exuberant vegetation, and tropical or sub-tropical temperatures.
Individual farmers were allocated land by the leader of the ayllu, the kinship group typical of both the Quechua and Aymara speakers of the Andes.
The allocations of land to individual farmers depended upon kinship, social status, and number of family members.
The royal estates made use of local labor, but also were staffed by a servant class called yanakunas who were ruled directly by Inca nobles and were outside the ayllu kinship system.
In some areas, such as the valley of Cochabamba in Bolivia, state farms were dedicated to the production of maize, the prestige crop of the Incas but one which could not be grown at the higher elevations of the Andes.
In the Andes, high cool elevations, scarcity of flat land, and climatic uncertainty were major factors influencing farmers.
The Incas, the local leaders of the ayllus, and the individual farmers decreased their risk of poor crop years with a variety of measures.
[8] The Incas placed great emphasis on storing agricultural products, constructing thousands of storage silos (qullqa or qollqas) in every major center of their empire and along their extensive road system.
[9] Hillside placements were used to preserve food in storage by utilizing the natural cool air and wind to ventilate both room and floor areas.
Careful records were kept of the products and quantities stored on the knotted cords, called quipu, which the Incas used in lieu of a written language.
[11] In many areas of the Andes, farmers, communities, and the Inca state constructed agricultural terraces (andenes) to increase the amount of arable land.
Andenes also reduced the threat of freezes, increased exposure to sunlight, controlled erosion, and improved the absorption of water and aeration of the soil.
The sparsely populated eastern slopes of the Andes enjoyed abundant precipitation and warmer temperatures than the highlands, but also had agriculture challenges such as steep terrain.
[18] In addition to these staple crops the people of the Inca empire cultivated a great variety of fruits, vegetables, spices and medicinal plants.
[17] The Inca agriculture system not only included a vast acreage of crops, but also numerous herds, some numbering in the tens of thousands, of animals, some taken by force from conquered enemies.
Main manual tools used include: The chaki taklla, rawk'ana, and waqtana were used by Andean farmers for thousands of years.
[9] Generally made from cobble stones, farming tools like the hoe, clod breaker and foot plough were used to break up the soil and make it easier to aerate and plant crop seeds.
[17] Another method that the Inca used to gain more farm land was to drain wetlands in order to get to the rich fertile top soil underneath the shallow water.
